Contact

Email:
kathryn.davidson[at]yale.edu

Spring 2015 office hours:
Wed. and Thurs. 4:30-5:20pm
Dow 302

I'm a postdoctoral fellow in Cognitive Science at Yale University where I work on language and linguistics, a foundational problem for cognitive scientists due to factors both environmental (e.g. everyone doesn't speak English) and innate (e.g. only humans can learn English). My own research investigates the unique capacity that humans have to understand an infinite number of sentences that we've never heard before (semantics), how we incorporate contextual information into these meanings (pragmatics), and how we ever learn to do this (development). I'm especially interested in what we can learn about linguistic meaning from visual language, both in natural sign languages like American Sign Language and in co-speech gestures to spoken languages like English. My background is in math and theoretical linguistics, and in my research I make balanced use of theory for hypothesis creation with using current psycholinguistic experimental methods for gathering and analyzing data.

Information about individual projects can be found under the Research tab.